In the flat Midwest of her youth Charlotte NOVITZ began painting landscapes: the dense green of the North predominating, white clapboard buildings and red barns: Her first encounter with mountains in countries around the Mediterranean almost ten years in Italy-revealed a less intense green, the gris-vert of pines and olive trees, ochre and white-washed stucco and all the astonishing subtleties of stone.

South of France ! Ten years in the Var, then 20 years ago at Orgon, in the Northeastern corner of the Alpilles. The writer Sylvie Durbec said of Charlotte’s work: ”What she gives us is infinite, and words would reduce the space of the work. Nevertheless, here appear lines and colour. And there, rocks. With the great French poet Arthur Rimbaud, Charlotte can say,

If I have a passion, it is for earth and stones .

Charlotte has always been an open-air painter. She has painted and drawn landscapes, townscapes, cityscapes: geometric configurations of houses and roofs, bridges; in Provence, the patchwork-effect of small vineyards on undulating terrain, distant hills, romantic ruins and chapels scrub pines and limestone rocks. You will immediately connect her work with what you have seen here.

Until the year 2000 she exclusively employed watercolor; a dry-brush technique, the subject sketched lightly in pencil, nuanced, evanescent.

Exploring the half-tones, her palette violet and blue, gold and pink. You are far, far from the garish daubs of the galleries that sell “Provencal Postcards.”

Charlotte at work in her studio

Since then the challenge of a more abstract vision and a more rapid execution became a priority. Charcoal and dry pastel replaced watercolour and she returned to an Expressionist style used even before her studies with Oscar Kokoschka, at Salzburg in 1959 and 1961.

There she won Second and First Prizes. When you see her works, it is apparent why this great artist, of world-wide renown, awarded Charlotte NOVITZ.

Complementary to landscape painting, and a lifelong subject of Charlotte’s oeuvre are portraits and the nude.